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India: Maoists call for bandh against new Bastar ‘peace’ campaign

Raipur : Outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist) has given a call for a 48 hour ‘Dandakaranya’ bandh from September 22, demanding disbanding of Bastar’s newly formed “Shanti Sangharsh Morcha”, alleging that it was a new avatar of “fascist Salwa Judum” — the anti-Naxalite campaign which was launched in June 2005.

The Maoist call for a two day bandh came after a group of tribals, who met on Gandhi Jayanti day in Bijapur district, formed ‘Dandakaranya Shanti Sangharsh Morcha” for launching a ‘non-violent’ people’s campaign to restore peace in the strife-torn Bastar region.

“Maoists will be observing a 48 hour DK bandh on September 22 and 23 to protest against the newly formed organization as it is a new avatar of Salwa Judum”, CPI (Maoist) Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee spokesman Gudsa Usendi said in a communiqué sent to the media in Bastar.

The so-called Dandakaranya region — which the rebels term as “DK” state — forms part of forest areas of Bastar, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Orissa. Maoists claim it as their ‘Liberated zone’ while the the civil administration’s consider it as areas dominated by the rebels.

The initiative for a new peace campaign began last month when a group of people, including a few of those who were associated with the Salwa Judum, met at Karkeli village and decided to formulate strategies to take the campaign ahead for establishing peace in the area. Later, they met again at Kutroo village in Bijapur district on October 2 and resolved to work for peace without carrying any weapons by following the Gandhian path of non-violence.

Salwa Judum, which began as a small protest from Karkeli village in Bijapur district on June 2005, had turned into frenzy in South Bastar, once the cherished zone of the Maoists. The movement, which the state government described as a spontaneous peoples campaign against the Naxalites, spread far and wide and turned the entire South Bastar into a battle field. The Naxalites unleashed attacks on Salwa Judum cadres, who went on a prowl against Maoist sympathizers, and the conflict led to police and Para-military forces swarming the region.

Maoist call for two day bandh against the newly formed Dandakaranya Shanti Sangharsh Samiti is being seen as an attempt to thwart the possibility of new campaign spreading into the remote areas where the rebels have their base.

Comprador-bureacratic bourgeoisie and their feudal class siblings love to use so-called “non-violent” means to achieve their aims of restoring their oppressive and exploitative social order under the ideological cover of “peace” in areas they’ve lost political control of. Gandhi, their immortalized ideological lord of “non-violence” sponsored by their Euro-US imperialist bourgeois masters, has withstood the test of time remarkably well since he was put on the historical stage after World War 2 to divert the rising tide of militant peasant rebellions away from violently capsizing the colonial and semi-feudal ruling order British imperialism had painstakingly established in India.

Too bad for the imperialist and its comprador-bureaucratic puppets in oppressed countries, the completion of the new democratic revolution in China in 1949 followed by the launching of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution in 1966 sparked off a unprecedented ideological struggle launched by younger generations of revolutionary communists to break out of the stranglehold of revisionism that has been dragging the revolutionary internationalist movement of the proletarian class into the deadend of reformism. Successive generations of younger revolutionaries in oppressed countries such as India, Philippines, Peru and Nepal were conscientized to carry on the unfinished task of completing the Maoist new democratic revolution all over Asia, Latin America and Africa. After nearly half a century of carrying out an arduously protracted new democratic revolutionary people’s war against the neo-colonial and semi-feudal ruling order in India, successive generations of Maoist revolutionaries from Charu Mazumdar to Anuradha and Kobad Gandhi have also succeeded in conscientizing the toiling masses and countless progressive Indian youths from various classes to see through the historical fraud perpetrated by Gandhi and his Euro-US imperialist sponsors.

The abovementioned Bandh in DK spearheaded by CPI(MLM) is another shining example of the continuous political and ideological struggle to expose the historical fraud perpetrated by Gandhi’s brandname of “non-violent” reformism in India.